


Fear

by booksnchocolate



Category: Bandom, Marianas Trench, Real Person Fiction
Genre: Angst, Gen, Gen or Pre-Slash, M/M, One Shot, slight reference to drug use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-08
Updated: 2013-12-08
Packaged: 2018-01-04 00:54:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1075151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/booksnchocolate/pseuds/booksnchocolate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It sneaks up on him still, this fear.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fear

**Author's Note:**

> **Warnings:** Slight reference to drug use.
> 
> **Disclaimer:** I don’t know anyone mentioned here. Written for fun, not profit. 
> 
> **A/N:** Originally posted anonymously on [ FYJM](http://fuckyeahjoshandmatt.tumblr.com/post/69312099318).

As a child of eight, Matt would wake up in the middle of the night, and he would be scared. He would fear the shadows looming in his room, the impenetrable darkness of the corners. He would creep from under the covers and run the gauntlet of shadows down the hall to his parents’ bedroom, not looking back, not breathing until he was safe in his mother’s arms. The monsters may have been imaginary, but the fear was real.

That fear has nothing on this.

This, this is the living nightmare of Josh, of watching him teeter on the brink of disaster, and not knowing how to stop it. This is the desperation of being fourteen and confused, of tired eyes and shaking hands, and broken words saying  _I’m fine, Matty, fine_ , like a record on repeat. This fear is helplessness, the painful tightness in his chest as Matt stands and watches his best friend cry, not knowing how to stop it.

It sneaks up on him still, this fear. It’s a deep pain, a secret pain, and darker than anything Matt has felt before or ever will again. It’s the long, dark nights when the wind rattles outside and the light keeps seeping from Josh’s curtains because he’s not sleeping, not sleeping, and Matt lies in his own bunk, twisting and turning and hating himself for not being able to prevent this. This fear is Josh at sixteen passing out in class; this fear is Josh at twenty-six resting his head on the piano as he sobs out the words to  _Lover Dearest_. This fear is the sick twisting in Matt’s gut every time he sees the dullness in Josh’s eyes, hears the defeat in his voice, because no matter what Matt says or does, he can’t make Josh better. He can make Josh happy – for an hour, for a day – but he can’t keep him that way, and he’s been trying for over a decade and he still feels like Josh is sometimes just a hair’s breadth from the edge.

Matt doesn’t need to dig deep to realize this, his deepest fear. He’s known it, been intimately acquainted with it since fourteen, since Josh started disappearing, since he started losing weight and shaking smoke-smell out of his clothes. This fear rides with him always, in the clench of Josh’s jaw, in the bags beneath his eyes, in the tension in his shoulders, and Matt wants to  _cry_ , he wants to break and collapse and dissolve into ruin because Josh isn’t happy and nothing Matt does can change that. Matt knows through long, bitter experience, that he cannot save Josh from himself; he can only help lessen the damage. And every day he tries,  _God_ , he tries to make it that much easier, to coax a little more of a smile from those lips. And every day he smiles back and feels the fear squirming under his skin, squeezing his heart because he’s scared one day, this won’t be enough.

_He_  won’t be enough.

And Josh – crazy, genius, wonderful Josh – will stumble and fall right over the edge Matt has been holding him back from all these years.

Matt doesn’t need to examine his fear. He only needs to wait for the day it comes true.


End file.
